How do I start up a headless Virtualize server?

Hey everyone! Often in organizations, users will want to be able to spread the work that they have done with others, allowing progress to be shared. Virtualize is no exception to this rule, as there will be many times across a team where users will want to be able to access the same virtual endpoint as opposed to the real endpoint for testing and verification purposes. This guide will step you through the process of starting up a headless Virtualize server that can be shared across your team.

Prerequisites

Before we embark on our journey, there are a few things that we need before we can go on.

A Virtualize server license

A localsettings file --Note: This file is a description of all of the different preferences that users can set within their Virtualize desktop client. A post describing the process of creating and editing the localsettings file can be found here.

An FTP client or some other means of moving the localsettings file to the Virtualize machine

Access to the machine the Virtualize server will be running from

An installation of Virtualize on that machine

Starting up

Now that we have our prerequisites taken care of, it's time to put them to use. First, use your FTP client to drop the localsettings file from your local machine to the headless machine. For ease of access, it is recommended to drop this file into the Virtualize installation directory.

Now, open up your terminal/command prompt. Once it is open, navigate to your Virtualize installation directory, and use the following command to start up your Virtualize server:
-(Windows) virtualizecli.exe -startServer -localsettings "localsettings.properties"
-(Linux) ./virtualizecli -startServer -localsettings "localsettings.properties"

Note: if you are using a workspace different than your default workspace, you can specify to start up in that workspace by using the following flag in the startup command:
-data "path_to_workspace"

Connecting to the headless server

Once your server is up and running, the next step is to connect your desktop client to it.

To do so, open up your Virtualize client and look at your Virtualize server tab. Here, there will be a button with the Virtualize logo on it with a small '+' symbol on it. Click this button to bring up the "Add Server" window.

Here, enter in the hostname of the server you installed Virtualize onto, the Display name on your machine for that server, and the protocol for the server (default http). If you are connected to CTP/Environment Manager, you may also need to enter in your CTP/EM login to this window.

Once that is done, click OK, and if you have everything configured correctly, then congrats, you have stood up and connected to a remote Virtualize server.

To make changes to the virtual assets on the headless Virtualize server, you'll first want to follow the last section of the original post to connect to the headless server.

Once you're connected, you will be able to see all of the virtual assets on the remote server by looking at the dropdown for the headless server. To edit one of those virtual assets, you can right click them and select "Copy to workspace".

After editing the virtual asset and testing it on your machine, you can re-deploy it to the remote server by clicking the pva from the virtual asset explorer on the left side of your Virtualize desktop instance and dragging it into the Virtual Assets folder for the remote server in the Virtualize server view on the right side of the screen.

For the headless Virtualize, you can view event logs in Event viewer the same way you would do so for the local version of Virtualize.

For the keystore, are you referring to the one you would set in the security section of the preferences menu in the local Virtualize instance?

If so, you can edit this through use of the localsettings file that defines your Virtualize license. If you want to see the different options that you can specify in the file, you can export your local Virtualize localsettings file with the Security Client Settings box checked.

If you need a refresher on how to do so, there is a post detailing how to edit and share the localsettings file here.

I was working on setting up soatest server and virtualize server on one of our linux environments. I followed the intallation instructions in the installation guide to run the install script from the shell and that worked fine - no errors on installation. I followed these instructions to start the server in headless mode. I copied over the local settings file exported from our current windows installation.

To date we have not been able to have the server start nor run any tests via the cli because we recieve the error "ERROR: Error: com.parasoft.xtest.application.api.ApplicationException: No valid license". In the license server we reallocated the server license from the windows machine above to this machine (updating the machineID accordingly).

We have tried
- having the license information in the localsettings file
- seeding the license information in the license file
- passing in licenseserver via the licenseserver parameter

On our license server, the server sees the request for the pick up of the license, but none of the features get activated. Any thoughts?

Does your License have the Command line feature enabled? It may be possible that you do not have the command line feature available.
Also, are you using a universal license? I believe some licenses are OS specific. It may be that your license is only meant for a Windows machine. A Universal License could handle both, Windows and Linux. Does your License work on other Linux machines? How about other Windows Machines? Best bet would be to contact Maint@parasoft.com and ask what your specific License is eligible for